Although your reviewer was vaguely aware of Brighton's all-girl troupe ELECTRELANE previously (mostly via the Stranglers-bothering title of their 2001 debut album "Rock It To The Moon"), this is his first real brush with the fiesty quartet.
And "On Parade" (the trailer single for their due-next-January second LP) is a pretty decent blind date, too: the product of a typically creative (and brief) liaison with Steve Albini in Chicago, it's a growling, rumbling, bassy beauty with spidery guitar a la Slint/ Slits and Albini's typically in-yer-mush production all logically included. I particularly enjoy singer Verity Susman's half-spoken/ half-drawled vocals and the way she makes simple lines like "when I see her" sound like a thinly-veiled threat.
Throw in that weird, penetrating falsetto bit at the end and you've got an insistent little bugger which sounds like a distant, not entirely cerebral cousin of the current punk-funk cred crush and most definitely food for thought. The B-side, meanwhile, stretches credibility even further as the girls demolish Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire". Not that you'd guess it from this version, mind. Actually, several spins of this begs the question: if 'The Boss' was on fire, would Electrelane piss on him? Hmm, probably not on this evidence.
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Anyway, I digress. "On Parade" again shows that weird, wonky and wonderfully angular guitar shapes can still be thrown post-Millennium and that Electrelane are a far more interesting home-grown bet in the post-punk-funk stakes than their over-rated American cousins Erase Errata. Class tells in time, doesn't it?
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